While setting up a system for a client, yesterday, and addint a little candy to it, I hit an error which is responsible for these two bugs 1, 2. I'm not entirely sure, but IIRC there's been a livedvd released in the last 6 months, so that bug should at least have been noticed.

That bug would be so easy to resolve, just adding the executable bit, but either no one cares or - which I find more likely - no one finds it.

I'm not sure how bugs are assigned, if that is completly automatic, but if it's not, that would have been so easy and quickly to fix that assigning it to someone else is completly unneeded. I'm positive that there are hundreds of these simple things floating around, things like typos, forgotten deps, etc and they are piling up.

As I understand it, there's an ongoing process moving portage to git, but I fail to see how that should help resolving this kind of stuff, since someone always will (need) to to take a review before pulling the changes in. The same goes for sunrise and all the other overlays, very rarely are changes or new stuff committed to official portage and that's really really annoying.

Isn't there a better way on the horizon? I'm thinking about something like an open tree, where everyone - say with an registered email and 100+ normal posts - can just make changes/additions to the tree? Have official Gentoo maintainers somehow sign their ebuilds(&patches and whatnot) and make portage issue a warning when something is about to get merged which doesn't have official approval?

These are things everybody could fix, but becoming a developer or (proxy-)maintainer is just an annoying process not much people are willing to do or there are only a set of standards which is to high for these things for people to achieve. It's no help that I know how to fix these things, they are reported and sometimes fixed with available patches or documentation, but no one takes care, so people end up fixing this locally - that can't really be the solution?!_________________++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

Problem is, there's no such thing as jumping right in, because the structures for that are lacking. Applying to become an official dev is complicated and time consuming and worst of all, not guaranteed to be succesful. I read blog posts of people needing months to do that - having wife&life doesn't make that any easier.

Besides, that would just be working on the symptoms at best. First I'd have to find my way around and then it's not guaranteed that just because a single dev more is available, that I alone could take on all the things I mentioned above.

It would be way easier to have a system, where Gentoo devs would take care of the @system set (plus maybe some highly important/security affected stuff) and make the rest more open to others.

Right now, from what I experience, devs are simply to overloaded to work on their fields and review other stuff, so for the latter, there needs to be a better way to get it done, either some designated dev, some kind of peer review or a technical solution. Getting all this simple stuff out of the way of the people doing the heavy lifting would imho go a long way for the whole project, but I currently fail to see anything in this regard._________________++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

If you want to chase up bugs, the best way is to do it on IRC, chat.freenode.net in #gentoo-dev-help -- you don't have to try to become a developer first, nor even a proxy-maintainer (though if you're consistently fixing the same package, you might prefer to, or be asked to, eventually.)